Destroying Progressivism: A Strategy

1. Grand Strategy

The Grand strategy defines the goal or purpose of a war. All other strategies exist in support of the grand strategy.

The grand strategic goal in the war against progressivism is the destruction of the progressive control of American society.

Today’s American progressives are preparing for their final consolidation of power. It does not matter that Donald Trump is president or that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, as well as most state legislatures. Progressives consider this to be only a temporary interruption of that final consolidation, which will be based upon their control of the media, education, and the government bureaucracy. They are also counting on their ability to introduce tens of millions of illegal aliens more into the United States who will then vote for the permanent expansion of progressive control over society. When progressives next take the presidency, they intend to use that office to ensure, through the deliberate and permanent suppression of anti-progressive opposition, the creation of their final revolution.

After 1932, the process of consolidating all political and social authority in the national state became an ongoing progressive project for the next eighty years. But it remained an incremental project for decades, because there were too many constitutional and social roadblocks standing between progressives and any final consolidation of power.

Those roadblocks are now largely dissolved. More importantly, progressives are mentally primed for a final victory as the political end game comes into view. From this point forward, progressives intend to no longer tolerate any public statements of belief, or any public actions, which directly contradict progressive beliefs. Even today, although out of power in Washington D.C., progressives are busy perfecting social methods of public intimidation and public violence. When another progressive president is elected, the full weight of the national state, and of that state’s deputized social authorities, will be used to suppress that dissent.

As the end game approaches, the beliefs of progressives are becoming more and more surreal, even as society becomes more and more dysfunctional. Although the formal end game of the progressives is to create the final progressive revolution, the real end game will be the creation of a permanent anarcho-tyranny. This is a society that will be at once lawless and excessively governed by law. Under anarcho-tyranny, it will be the law-abiding who will be punished by the state, while the lawless will be under state subsidy.

Which raises the following grand strategic question: How are we to create a revolution that will destroy the progressive control of American society?

In the nineties, it was believed by many of those who best understood the new technological revolution that the computer and the Internet would destroy the centralized business corporation and the centralized state. The individual as such would now be able to deal online directly with other individuals without the need for intermediate institutions. The power of the giant corporations and of the central state would decline as this radical disintermediation of society occurred.

But things did not turn out that way, at least in the short run.

Instead, over the past two decades, a small number of megacorporations have arisen online to become the intermediaries through which people interact. These new megacorporations are not only hyper-centralized in their organization, but also employ the technologies of mass data collection and continual online surveillance to track everything that everyone does online. At the pinnacle of this system are the security agencies of the national state, which also track and record every individual online.

Thus the most immediate result of the technological revolution has been the hyper-centralization of social and political power.

However, this is not the complete story. For there are also tens of millions of people online who are organizing and communicating outside of those corporate platforms, and also within them, in ways never before possible. A radical decentralization of power and authority is also going on.

Take the news media as an example. During most of the twentieth century, the progressive-controlled major newspapers, major newsmagazines, broadcast networks, and major wire services were the institutions that decided not only what the news of the day would be, but how that news would be interpreted. This progressive system is now in radical decline. Today, there are tens of thousands of anti-progressive news sources online that continually contradict the progressive news narrative. Roughly one third to one half of the American people now routinely ignore the news of the major media and receive much or most of their news from these alternative news sources. Trump’s election became possible only because nearly half the American people agreed with him that the major media were nothing more than “fake news.”

This is also why, in the wake of Trump’s election, that the progressive corporations which control the major online platforms are now actively engaged in strategies to suppress the anti-progressive media online. These corporations are involved in a major effort to suppress, to downgrade, or even to remove, those online news sources that contradict the progressive narrative.

And yet, those who are the most familiar with the ongoing technological revolution continue to believe that a radical decentralization of power is coming. They argue that innovations in software are only now beginning to subvert, and that they will ultimately destroy, the Big Tech platforms.

Are they right in this belief?

It does seem that, if the progressives’ control of American society is to be destroyed, it will be through the use of this new technology.

In the final analysis, the progressive control of American society is inseparable from their ability to centralize political and social power. Progressives themselves fully believe that all such authority must be centralized in order for them to create their final revolution. Progressivism ultimately stands or falls, not on the persuasiveness of its system of beliefs, which are increasingly nonsensical, but on their ability to centralize power.

Thus the coming destruction of the progressive control of American society and the coming technological decentralization of that society are the same revolution.